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A primary motivation for scientific inquiry has always been the notion that our scientific discoveries offer us transcendence from our subjectivity, that they give us access to absolute objective truths (or at least some approximation of it). Stephen Hawking’s famous line about knowing “the mind of god” captures both the essence and the intellectual history of this idea. Physicists, for example, frequently treat their discoveries as a secular analogue of divine wisdom, with the Einstein equation or Newton’s laws sacred to them just as scripture is to the pious. And this scientific spirit, as opposed as scientific culture currently stands to organized religion, grew out of western theology. It’s not an accident that Newton and Copernicus were devout Christians.

But the philosophers realized long ago that “God is dead.” The failures of centuries of metaphysics to rationalize Christianity failed and were abandoned. Nietzsche pointed out that without God, there was nothing standing in the way of a descent into nihilism. Much of philosophy became devoted either to resolving or confronting this new reality. Nietzche believed that this inconvenient truth was recognized at least subconsciously by all, but that Christians remained in a state of denial out of fear or angst.

The death of God presaged the death of the analogue scientific idol, absolute objectivity, which would come with the advent of Quantum Mechanics. The world can be understood, but, it turns out, according to the most straightforward interpretations of quantum theory this is a matter of being able to establish a consistent intersubjective reality more than one of accessing a single overarching objective one. As Niels Bohr said:

“Physics is to be regarded not so much as the study of something a priori given, but rather as the development of methods of ordering and surveying human experience. In this respect our task must be to account for such experience in a manner independent of individual subjective judgement and therefore objective in the sense that it can be unambiguously communicated in ordinary human language.”

“The Unity of Human Knowledge” (October 1960) (emphasis mine)

“There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature…”

As quoted in “The philosophy of Niels Bohr” by Aage Petersen

The Schrodinger’s cat thought experiment makes a lot more sense once you’re willing to demote the wavefunction from a descriptor of some transcendent, objective reality, to an effective bookkeeping device for describing an (information theoretical) relationship that the observer has with the cat. Nowadays, physicists have taken many of these ideas even further, e.g. with Black Hole Complementarity.

This picture of science also resolves another paradox, presented in the first pages of Roger Penrose’s Road to Reality. It goes like this. The physical universe, according to the standard scientific picture, is a subset of all mathematical possibilities. In fact one could say the goal of science is to distinguish which subset is the correct one. Mathematics, on the other hand, is itself a subset of our mental activities. That is, our mind can in principle if not in practice access all of mathematical reality, but also is capable of non-mathematical things like emotions. Finally, our brains are proper subsets of the physical universe. This circular picture is paradoxical. Penrose did not claim to know the resolution.

But the paradox dissolves if we embrace the view of science advocated by Bohr and based on the lessons of quantum mechanics. The realm of mathematical possibility is not an independent world, but a collection of methods available for relating our minds to the world. Mathematics is what connects our minds to the world, it isn’t a separate platonic realm of its own, independent of our minds and the physical universe.

One might argue that a careful reading of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason bolsters this framework for science as well. We cannot access things “in and of themselves.” So this philosophy of science far predates quantum theory and was born in the aftermath of the original scientific revolution of Newton and his contemporaries. The quantum nature of the atomic realm merely reinforces it.

Nevertheless many or even most scientists have not accepted this paradigmatic change and properly confronted its implications. Almost all are aware, but like Nietzsche’s Christians many avoid or deny it, lest they fall into a kind of nihilism of the scientific spirit. (for a recent example of this, see the recent awakening of the great Steven Weinberg to the problem)

It may be that this sort of cognitive dissonance is what drives much of the research on alternative interpretations of quantum theory. Many people are drawn to science in general and physics in particular because of the desire to reach for absolute objective truth. It’s a psychological impossibility for them to accept that the findings of their pursuit undermine its original purpose. Famously, even Einstein could not accept these lessons. And how could he? His belief in “Spinoza’s God” had led him to General Relativity, one of the greatest intellectual achievements of human history.

But if we’re honest, we’re faced with a problem. How can we accept some of the more sobering lessons of fundamental physics without losing our sense of purpose in the process? If the moon isn’t there unless we’re looking at it, should we really bother to wonder about it?

There are of course technological reasons to pursue scientific research. The practical value of science is not diminished, and of course that matters. But what of the scientific spirit? Are we left with some form of scientific nihilism? An existential despair of the scientific spirit?

This is worth working through and worth being discussed. But I can offer a personal solution based on my own journey coming to terms with quantum mechanics. I’ve found that, for myself, connection can replace transcendence as a motivation for a scientific life. When I reflect carefully about what’s driven me to study science, it was really a desire to feel connected to the universe, and to broaden and sharpen my experience of reality. None of the revolutions of quantum mechanics need diminish this. I think there was always an unnecessary arrogance in the idea of an absolute objectivity, the belief that we could access a “view from nowhere”, that our minds could be mirrors for the world, that we could reconstruct the universe in totality in our heads. To instead treat science as more about connecting ourselves to the world around us, and about our relationship to it, feels more honest. It doesn’t diminish my motivation while having the added benefit of embodying a humility commensurate with the reverence with the world around us that all scientists feel.

Science is an unsettling enterprise. This is much of what makes it different from law, or politics, or art, or religion, or other noble and worthwhile pursuits. Science is not interested in conveying fundamental truths, or in ensuring people’s safety, or in improving lives, or telling stories, although it has played a role in all these endeavors and will continue to do so. It is first and foremost a commitment to the unknown and a desire to transform it into something tractable; as Galileo put it, “to measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so.” This quote offends some of my friends as dehumanizing, and rightly so. The fact of the matter is that science often tells us things we don’t want to hear, in ways that are hard to understand unless you have a PhD, and for reasons that are opaque to outsiders. Insiders spend most of their time either doing experiments that don’t produce publishable findings or throwing out bad ideas. Even successful papers are boring. We do acknowledge all this kerfuffle as worthwhile and meaningful, and we certainly depend on science’s discoveries. But science, pound for pound, is a mercurial idol, and we haven’t learned how to worship it in a way that feels collectively satisfying.

If we instead look to pop culture, and consider what most people who are looking for intellectual fulfillment or affirmation find exciting and stimulating, it seems that philosophy wins out. Western thinking, after all, was inaugurated by a troll. Socrates’ metaphor of the cave in The Republic remains an acceptable and accessible metaphor for how almost everyone lives their lives and, in the figure of those who escape to the sunlight, the image of what we all strive to achieve. Never mind that most people don’t actually try to do this; the idea is a beautiful one, and pleasing to think about. It is much easier to imagine yourself as someone striving to reach for ultimate, real, uncompromised Truth than as a scientist, trying to make out shadows on the wall in ever greater and verifiable detail. It is true that modern people have a drive for distinction, but in almost all cases this is expressed as a drive for consumption rather than self-expression—the shows we watch, food we eat, people we elect to hang out with, etc. Perhaps out of laziness or wishful thinking, we like to have our own perspectives be regularly affirmed. We allow ourselves to expect some easy alchemy from our ties and associations even though we know that lead and gold are atomically independent elements.

This game of social tautology has its limits. We watch Neil DeGrasse Tyson and expect some kind of realization from his descriptions of the cosmos. We watch The Big Bang Theory not exclusively because we like to make fun of nerds, but because Sheldon Cooper reminds us of Buster Keaton. Bill Nye is kind of sexy. There is an insecurity in this that needs to be unpacked. Why do we sometimes expect science to speak to ourselves in ways that it demonstrably cannot? What task can it perform for our own spiritual, cultural, or libidinal fulfillment?

I am not trying to level an attack on science as a professional endeavor. Nor is my focus to vouchsafe the idea, which already lies at the foundation of Western philosophy, of living scientifically, even as I recognize that idea’s importance in my own life. Instead, I am suggesting that the vocation of science and the idea of living scientifically are even more wondrous when they are brought together—that Constructed Truth and Absolute Truth should be one and the same. This may be impossible to achieve, but it can at least act as a principle that guides our actions. It is not that science is our way of understanding the True, or that the True is an object of endless inward search, but that science can and should be approached as a vehicle for self-discovery, just as that process of discovery can only be called a scientific one.

There is a tradition of American thinking that is attuned to this. Thoreau’s grand experiment in Walden expresses the sentiment well: “It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day — that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.” Religion and art may more often serve this purpose, and they are less cognitively demanding, but our insecurity can be explained by our collective sense that scientists, however boring and self-contained their machinations are, are tapping into the “quality of the day” and embodying it in a register that other cultural luminaries cannot. Slavoj Zizek can convince me that capitalism monetizes my fetishes, the Dalai Lama can help me be more mindful, but science allows me to read them on my smartphone. Science takes the inner reality of nature and somehow makes it into a vehicle for our own self-affirmations. All four physical forces must have been accounted for and operationalized for me use my laptop to watch Rachel Maddow remind me I am not dreaming even though Donald Trump is now President-elect.

I could also cite Emerson: “There are always sunsets, and there is always genius; but only a few hours so serene that we can relish nature or criticism.” The problem here is that the relation of genius to the world is not just expressed in a shortage of time but in the multiple ways of appreciating that world. If how we experience the world determines how we interpret it, then a vast division of interpretive labor is necessary for its richness to be available to each of us. We crave a unity from this manifold, but we have a thirst that the very shape of our mouths makes impossible to quench.

Is it possible, then, to do science both professionally and existentially? To be both heroes at once? It’s a tall order. In my experience, many who pursue science as a vocation fail to live scientifically. Doing science is hard enough—being it is a whole other level. In fact, these two forms of science seem to actively oppose each other. I have studied at some of the world’s best universities, and I have interviewed some of the best scientists at those universities, and within a few moments of conversation it would often become clear that I was speaking with a person whose fundamental worldview became entrenched the moment an authority figure complemented their ability to intelligently transpose some trusted pattern of thought. The cultural values that accrue in the wake of this pivotal moment of ego reinforcement—among them the laudable traits of independent thinking and critical reflection—are distressing for not themselves embodying a hypothesized and systematically tested relation to the person’s life. They were adopted by force of habit, and crystallized as a person excelled at creating what he or she was told would be recognized by one’s elective community as honorable and good and worthwhile insofar as it would set up others to skillfully create in a likewise recognizable way. In this way, the existential foundations of science, and especially the most reproducible science, are almost always dogmatic in spirit.

The vocation of science encourages and even depends on deliberation. But it is almost antithetical to living deliberately. The school of Romanticism—willfulness, subjectivity, free expression, poeticizing, seduction—was itself formed in opposition to the pretention of science to discover the fundamental nature of reality. Having studied the intellectual history of that movement, I have always found it ironic and even tragic that this body of beliefs is essentially just a hypothesized instance of counterfactual reasoning: if the values of science are basically wrong, then the opposite ones might be better. Many of the modern world’s most brilliant artists and storytellers have been moved to rage against the spiritual “disenchantment” that science has caused, and told wonderful stories as a result, and in doing so they were living scientifically. The deliberate refusal of Schlegel, Kierkegaard, Shelley, and Novalis to see life singularly, and instead to see it as a playful and experimental domain for their own fantasies—what is more scientific than that?

We have here two models of heroism. The former is dependable, analytical, reproducible, and black box-able. Scientists train themselves into compartmentalizing Truth, and we gladly buy up their Truth-furniture, and use it to furnish our lives. The latter is protean, brave, original, daring, and intense. Artists paint experience in their own image, and we let these paintings color our own dreams and aspirations beyond the lives we now live. These two cultures, and their temperaments, seem utterly orthogonal. What might it mean to bring them together?

As you get older you realize that who you distinctively are is defined more and more by the breadth of your experiences than the field of your opportunities. People treat you more as a product of where you’ve been than what you could potentially become. What Thoreau and Emerson are getting at is that it is desirable, if not to reverse this process, then at least to operationalize it into a controllable variable. It need not just be “a part of life” or a force of nature. To make oneself into something that could be falsified, but nevertheless seems to be true—to transform the world into a laboratory for one’s own exposition—that is the scientific calling in the fullest sense of the term. Life must be lived forwards, but it can also be understood forwards, if understanding is elevated to a principle of vitality rather than reflection.

This all sounds very postmodern. David Foster Wallace, in his brilliant commencement address at Kenyon College, spoke of a liberal arts education similarly as empowering us to choose what we pay attention to and to choose how we make meaning from experience. But I would go a step farther and assert that the scientific life has not just an aesthetic but also a moral and even religious wind at its back. It is a lifestyle choice, but also a vocation, and even more fundamentally a kind of calling. The goal is not to escape boredom or to become happy with one’s own station but to reorient the logic of one’s relation to the world into something testable. We cannot escape the expectations of others, but we can willfully subject those expectations to a court of fair play where the result, i.e. ourselves, is more than arbitrary. To be fulfilled, rather than simply happy, means your happiness passes a test of statistical significance with the reality you have had a hand in constructing.

So to be a scientist, and to also live scientifically, would be to make the entirety of oneself into something tractable and fungible. Even as I write this, it sounds abhorrent and gross. And yet we know from the biographies of great writers and artists, who went out of their way to accumulate interesting and unprecedented life experiences and then tell new kinds of stories out of them, that they were much better at living scientifically than many so-called scientists themselves. We need not make this compromise so long as the truth that you want to discover and make understandable is the latent truth of yourself, something that is itself made in the course of your search for it. The maxim here is to make this process into something more than something that just happens. To be a scientist means to master the conditions of oneself.

Let my lovers be case studies, let my days be data points, let me sleep under the covering-laws of my own Procrustean bed.

Most people live in such a way that they are the center of their own lives. I believe that mindset can be happy and valuable when deliberately chosen, but we run into problems when it becomes our default setting. I call someone who is unreflectively self-centered in this way a “metaphysician.” In philosophy, a metaphysician is someone who spends time thinking about the first principles of things. I mean it in a more existential sense: someone who assumes that he or she has access to the bones of reality inside himself or herself, rather than considering that they may lie somewhere on the outside. Recently, I became interested in developing some practical tips on how to become something other than this. They are included below:

-Find a reliable way of reminding yourself that you do not have anything close to all the answers.

-Meditate twice a day.

-Understand the difference between knowing and understanding.

-Make sure that your own decisions have a proximate relation to the forces driving your life.

-Maintain friendships with people from different parts of your life.

-Don’t be mysterious on purpose.

-Indulge yourself as often and as richly as it is interesting to do so.

-Ruminate forward, not backward.

-See movies without consulting Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic.

-If it’s not an emotion you’re comfortable sharing with anyone, you probably shouldn’t be having it.

-Grow in ways that encourage you to grow.

-Keep track of the times when you start to be a certain way and of what had just happened.

-Be more interested in what you hear and see than in what you have to say and reveal.

-If it’s not a decision you can avoid, it’s also not a decision you should rush.

-See how long you can go without forming an opinion.

-Fail as often as you are able to learn from failure. Which is most of the time.

-Cultivate a meaningful distance between your decisions and your actions.

-Use anger as a forge, not as armor.

-Aim for a filter that keeps things spiffy and doesn’t just keep things hidden.

-Try to get better at trying.

-Trust your gut, it knows more than you do.

-Aim for skillful coping, not managing success.

-Decide which parts of your life you aren’t going to try to make better right now.

-Experiment in such a way that you don’t foreclose the possibility of future experiments.

-Experiment as often as possible.

-Don’t play games with yourself you can’t win.

-When all else fails, recognize that survival is its own virtue.

-Cultivate a relationship between your ends and your means of realizing them.

-Fill what’s empty, empty what’s full, scratch where it itches.

-Make the dysfunctional functional.

-Check that the parts of your life you don’t think about are the parts that are working.

-Forge meaning, build identity.

-Be willing to sacrifice uniqueness for distinctiveness.

-Learn the difference between being outstanding and standing out.

-Date.

-Fuck up artfully. At least make it a good story.

-Do not throw away your shot, but wait for it.

-When in doubt, get more data.

-Be aware of the things you put inside your body and your mind.

-Be discreet and not duplicitous.

-Master the art of forgiving yourself.

-Ensure the ambiguities of your life are healthy.

-Be glad to share the story of your past. Be afraid to know the story of your future.

-Get in the habit of forming habits.

-If you can’t laugh about it, don’t talk about it to people you don’t trust.

-Know what it would take for you to be happy, and don’t be indifferent to the stakes.

-Discover life’s contradictions, treat them as challenges, and share them as parables.

-See fear as a resource.

-Minimize fantasies, maximize projects.

-Gain intuition about your own limits. Be the person who decides what they are.

-Front-load your pain.

-Befriend your insecurities.

-Never be afraid to compromise in the pursuit of becoming yourself. In fact, jump at the chance.

-Live one day at a time.

-Attempt to please others, and work hard for what you care about, but strive to be yourself.

-Don’t try to be a great “man.” Just be a “man,” and let history make its own judgments.